Drizzle has gone into general availability, giving developers access to its open-source derivative of MySQL 6.0 that is a self-styled "database for the cloud".

The Drizzle7 general availability (GA) release, made available on Tuesday, can migrate data from MySQL and function as a replacement for the Oracle software. The database management system microkernel is specifically for large cloud and web applications and is designed to favour implementation on large, parallelised systems of multicore processing architectures.

Drizzle is modern, modular, rather solid and understandable.

– Stewart Smith, Drizzle

"Overall, I think we've managed to take the now-defunct MySQL 6.0 tree (way back in 2008) and release something that can truly live up to the line 'database for cloud'," Drizzle programmer Stewart Smith wrote on his blog on Tuesday. "Drizzle is modern, modular, rather solid and understandable."

Drizzle forked from MySQL 6.0 three years ago and has been in constant development since then. The Drizzle project community includes people involved in Sun's development of the database platform, such as Brian Aker, MySQL's director of architecture.

Drizzle "is in some ways similar to MySQL, and in other ways, unrecognisable", according to the Drizzle project. Specifically, it does not support Windows as a platform, it lacks an embedded server and favours large, concurrent environments over small ones.

"If we have the choice of improving performance for 1,024 simultaneous connections to the detriment of performance with only 64 connections, we will take that choice," reads the Drizzle documentation.

Drizzle7's database management system microkernel is based on C++. Its functionality is provided from specific plug-ins, built on what its developers describe as a "completely new plug-in architecture", which yields a lean kernel that is expandable.